


Somewhere Down This Road

by sorrylatenew



Category: Hockey RPF
Genre: Alternate Universe - Historical, Alternate Universe - Movie Fusion, Alternate Universe - Royalty, Amnesia, M/M, Road Trips
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-07-03
Updated: 2017-07-03
Packaged: 2018-11-22 18:07:59
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,810
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11385567
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sorrylatenew/pseuds/sorrylatenew
Summary: ONTARIO, CANADA, Sun. April 30, 1886: The King is Dead





	Somewhere Down This Road

**Author's Note:**

> Rating and tags to be updated as chapters are posted.
> 
> Based on the animated movie Anastasia, ~somewhat loosely.
> 
> This takes place in a universe that resembles our own but isn't at all. The time period is purposely ambiguous and anachronistic, somewhere around late 1800s/early 1900s with mixes of modern speech/social norms. Cars aren't common yet, roads aren't paved, and Canada has a royal family. This is where historical and geographical accuracy come to die.
> 
> Some minor depictions of violence in this chapter.
> 
> Endless endless thank you to saudades for the prereading and enthusiasm I needed, for always listening to my ideas; to allthebros for the beta, for being my sounding board full of suggestions I'd suck without, for making me gorgeous graphics to go with this fic, and listening to me whine about not being able to write for, like, three years (longer?? maybe longer); to fourfreedoms for prereading and encouraging, for listening to and cheering for this idea in its infancy, when it was something nearly entirely different and most certainly would not have existed without first being that chatfic. <333

Patrick doesn't know if this is drunk.

He thinks somehow not. Not quite yet. But he's warm like he wasn't expecting—a fizzing heat settled into his stomach and stretched slow along his limbs, alchohol thick in his teeth.

He slants a sideways look at Jonny like he might see it on him too, some kind of indication, but he only looks like Jonny, eyes squeezed tightly shut as he lifts his head off the floor to take another swig out of the bottle.

Some of the heat's probably from him, Patrick guesses. From the small gap between them. Just enough space to fit the wine where they can both reach it.

He taps his fingers into it—into the gap. Smooths them over the rug under their backs, then up the sloping neck of the bottle when Jonny clunks it down, both of them quiet for long enough that Patrick feels bounced out of a daze when Jonny opens his mouth.

"Twelve sounds...little," he announces into the lull of his bedroom. "Like—older than eleven, but sort of not."

It doesn't make any sense and Patrick furrows his eyebrows, squints at the ceiling. He tosses another glance at Jonny's face to see if there's more, and when there isn't, says, "What?"

"It sounds little. Like a kid. Twelve."

"You are a kid."

"I know." Jonny raises both arms into the space above him, waves them around in lazy, patternless motion, then drops them back down. The right one lands flush against Patrick, a dull thump of more seeping heat. "It just sounds a lot like— _kid._ Like the definition of it or something."

"Then what's eleven?"

"Different."

Patrick snorts at this, walks his elbows underneath him to lift up and look at Jonny for real. "You must be more drunk than I am," he says, and Jonny smiles a little in response to it, shrugs one shoulder. "Wait—are you?"

"What?"

"Drunk. Do you feel anything?"

"I don't know," Jonny says. He lifts up a bit himself, pulls his arm away to support his weight and stares at the far wall in faint concentration. "I feel kind of heavy."

"Heavy?"

"And like—talking."

Patrick squints again, this time at Jonny's face. "You feel heavy and like talking," he repeats, voice flat, but in reality doesn't know what they're supposed to feel at all. Only that it seemed like it'd be more than this, that it'd be more like when he listened to the guys play cards out in the stables, watched them achieve the kind of rowdy that always came out with the flasks.

"Yeah," Jonny agrees after what seems like too long, and lies back down. He stretches his arms out again, far to his sides instead of into the air above him, far, far until his fingertips brush the edge of the brown paper he'd let fall to the floor however long ago, earlier in the night. Patrick watches him toy with it, reaches to have another drink as Jonny drags the paper closer.

The wine's disgusting, to be honest. Sour and sort of...full in his mouth, stuck there even after he's swallowed, but not as bad as the first drink had been. He still rubs his tongue along the rough line behind his teeth, something to chase the taste away. Does it again after another fast gulp and then puts the wine down as though thoroughly finished, unsure if it was worth the trouble of sneaking in the first place.

"You don't feel anything at all?" Jonny asks as Patrick mirrors him, lies back down in a slump, arms tired.

"I feel warm, I guess," he says in answer, and feels suddenly sleepy too, but in a strange way, distant somehow. "Maybe...heavy," he goes on, watching bemusedly as Jonny balls up a torn shred of the paper to drop over Patrick's chest. "I guess I could see what you mean."

Jonny gets close to him then, rolls onto his side in a fuss. "I think it feels good," he says, and sends Patrick a slow smile, a slow blink, something weird and unintentional in his voice that gives Patrick's stomach an abrupt uncomfortable lurch while they stare at each other—a dip like jumping a horse too fast.

It passes like nothing though, as it always does. Gone next second like absolutely nothing when Jonny drops more paper over him, accepts a flicked hit to the middle of his forehead when it occurs to Patrick—over the thumping in his ribcage—to take part.

They trade aiming back and forth, stupid and grinning at each other and too competitive when Patrick gets tagged in the eye, no signs of stopping until Jonny just does. He stops, and he rests his head against the floor, and he heaves himself to roll fully onto his belly. Uses his arms as a pillow only to immediately reach out for the jacket that had started off wrapped in their ammo.

He makes a show of folding it, a lofty smile on his face in response to the arch of Patrick's eyebrow, and lays his head on top.

There's a pause while Patrick wonders if he's really going to go to sleep, and, absently, if he should do something about the bottle, drag himself up to stash it somewhere, knowing full well it'd be mostly his skin if anyone found them with it, but Jonny interrupts the thought—hums a little.

"Was nice of her," he says, muffled in the fabric. "Your mother. You should tell her I said thank you."

Patrick lets out a breezy puff of amusement through his nose. "You should tell her I said thank you," he repeats with a simpering air of politeness, voice dumb, then, "I'll tell her not to make you any more free shit," smiling through it, and Jonny cracks one eye back open at the still-new use of that word, the brown almost black in this light.

"Don't."

"I'll tell her you dropped it on the floor, then drooled on it later."

"I didn't drop it on the floor—you brought the wine in at the same time—"

"I'll tell her you really appreciate your name sewn on, because sometimes you forget it."

"No you won't," Jonny says, sure and relaxed, the tiredness settling over his face in visible waves, barely interrupted even when Patrick reaches a finger out to trace over said stitching, the 'ny' in Jonny's name exposed in one of the ruffled folds. "And that joke was stupid." His breath ghosts warm over Patrick's thumb, makes him take his hand away.

"You're stupid," Patrick shoots back, quiet, fond in a nervous sort of fashion that washes over him insistently, fills up his entire middle and lodges itself somewhere behind his Adam's apple. "Happy birthday, moron," he says when he's almost certain Jonny's drifted off—not far behind him himself, very nearly completely there when Jonny says, too late into the darkness, 

"You're a moron."

And they sleep.

Though Patrick, for his part, isn't certain he ever reaches that point.

He lies caught in the strange place between dreaming and thinking, hears the music from earlier in the ballroom played over images of the chores he knows are coming. Hears his father's orders to have Jeremiah's stall cleaned out. Hears those meshed with Catherine's droning list of kitchen duties, and that into Ralph's laugh, his urging for Patrick to prove he can ride Arrow without being bucked off tumbling into the swirling of Jonny's cousin Clara's skirts—into Jonny meeting his eyes from tables away—into Maggie's voice whispering _Jonathan,_ and then _Jonathan,_ and _Your Highness,_ and—

"—Patrick?"

He startles awake like bursting from water, like being pushed off a ledge.

"What?" he says, automatic, breathless, and almost knocks the bottle over when he shoots up into sitting, tilts it dangerously close to spilling all over himself and Maggie's slippers.

She doesn't seem to pay it any attention, that or the bits of paper he sends cascading over his lap and onto the carpet. She just peers fixedly at the two of them, hand in a tight clutch at the front of her robe.

"What are you doing here, Patrick?"

Doing here?

He blinks at her rapidly, tries thinking around a racing mind. He was—What is he doing here? He—

"You should go home."

"What?" he says again, and tries shifting his body so she might keep on not seeing, pulse so strong he feels it like a trapped bird in his neck.

"Go home—right now. Go as fast as you can. Right now."

"Home?"

"Now," she says, but Patrick doesn't move, only blinks, only watches as she comes closer, bypasses him altogether and bends down to press her hands to Jonny's arm while Patrick swallows against the sudden awareness of his mouth and how it tastes like he had Jeremiah's stall contents for dinner.

"Maggie?" comes Jonny's voice from next to him, broken and thick with sleep as he twists around to lift himself up, perch onto unsteady hands and knees with her grip around his elbow. "What—?"

"You'll need your shoes, Your Highness," Maggie says, brisk and firm, carefully measured. "And your coat. It's snowed—come on, quickly now." And she leaves the both of them there to stare at her as she bustles across the room, starts feeling into the shadowed corners on either side of Jonny's wardrobe. 

Patrick watches her at it, saddled in his concern from seconds ago, but slipping out as he rubs at his face—slipping into something else as she hurries back with Jonny's boots and tugs on his feet like a baby's, purposeful, no-nonsense, like Jonny needs the help.

When the first boot is on, Patrick wonders if it's possible to feel this awake while sleeping.

"What time is it?" Jonny asks, sitting there dumb, excessively agreeable in half-conscious bewilderment. 

Maggie reaches for the jacket still folded on the floor and starts helping him into this, creates a tangle of limbs as Jonny's hands make a belated attempt at getting into the second boot himself.

"It's four o'clock," she says, appeasing, as though she only wants him to keep on cooperating, and she gives a nod to Jonny's next question of, 

"In the morning?"

But that is clear even without the answer, windows as dark as they are—black with night, and through the fog in his brain, Patrick thinks: Something Is Wrong.

He presses one hand to the floor for balance, gets himself onto his feet in a lumbering heave. The moonlight is enough that picking a path across the room isn't difficult in that way, but getting his legs to support him takes a moment, a stuttered attempt at remembering how to walk in order to better see outside.

He has to lean against the window frame to steady himself, one hand to the cool oak as he takes in Maggie's mentioned dusting of snow, patchy over dead grass in the garden. Some of it swirls past like an afterthought, flecks of white caught in the wind against a backdrop of the palace—the west wing opposite them—no lights anywhere that he can make out.

Nothing.

"Maggie…?" he says, frowning, half turning towards her, no idea what he expected, but the trailing worry of her name is all he gets out before the door creaks open.

It's barely a cautious inch, barely a sound, but it cuts through all of them like gunfire, makes Jonny jump and send the wine onto its side after all.

Patrick watches the sudden blackness of it ooze across the rug, eyes inexplicably caught, his body frozen solid as a scuffling slips in from the open crack—a low mutter—and the door swings inward fully, makes Patrick's heart seize in his chest before the uniforms can swim into any kind of sense in this darkness.

He goes weak when he recognizes them for what they are, slumps heavy against the wall with the relief of it.

"Let me in," comes a hissed whisper from behind the guardsmen, and when one shifts aside the Queen squeezes her way into the room between them, wrapped in her dressing gown.

Even through the alarm Patrick has a brief startled thought of _oh_ at the sight of her, a hurried reaction—almost instinctual—to avert his gaze from the flattened bird's nest that is her hair, but it's fleeting. Gone when she rushes forward, towards Jonny and the spill, and Patrick has a wild moment of panic—a wild sudden certainty that the wine is what they're here for, that he was careful, but Catherine must have noticed, must have gone into the cellar after him and—

"Jonathan, up," the Queen says, bending over him as Maggie had done. She wastes no time in taking Jonny's arms, gives a forceful backwards pull. "Up, up!" But as she tugs Jonny just moves into the jerking limply, a dead fish smashed over the head.

"Mother, what—?"

"Get up!" she says, this like Patrick has never heard her, and Jonny gets up—staggers up. Stumbles into his mother with pajamas stuffed haphazardly into his boots, jacket askew.

" _Maman_ —"

She turns from him, distracted, turns in an uncertain half circle, her eyes darting. They flit over Patrick twice before she appears to see him, and when she opens her mouth, the question seems posed to the room in general. "Where is David?"

A pause. Less than that—a bare second.

"Maggie?" She turns again, locks onto the girl. "Maggie, where—"

"The King, Your Majesty," Maggie answers, hand clutched back at her robe, tight as the crease of her eyebrows. "He was with the King—in the entrance hall—I couldn't—"

Queen Andrée stares at her, a long blank look that makes Patrick abruptly want the conversation to end, the whole thing to end, before she seems to come to some decision and strides forward in direction of the door, a hurried pace that turns into a near jog the closer she gets, but Maggie runs full out after her, throws her body into the entrance as the guardsmen move to position themselves in front of the Queen.

"Ma'am, you can't—"

"Get out of my way!"

"You _can't_ go down there, they'll—"

But Patrick and Jonny do not learn who will what, or anything else.

The floor shakes underneath their feet.

Patrick will not remember if that was first, or the sound. A boom louder than the word can call to mind, a roaring, terrible and close and joined by a second thunderous wave before the first has passed.

He realizes he's screamed the same moment he realizes he's ducked, the rip of it from his throat nothing compared to the immediate ringing in his ears.

He stays hunched there on the ground, his breath held, arms over his head so tightly he feels them shaking, and only looks up when the zing of his blood is enough he'll leap if he doesn't move.

He sees Jonny before he sees the rest of the room. His wide eyes, his face lit up orange. An orange overlay spread out across Jonny's crimson bed curtains, across the Queen and Maggie as they crouch in the doorway, colors like the sun had simply decided to drop in early. 

But when Patrick looks towards the window—too close to see out of it properly, so crawling, lifting himself the barest amount—it's fire. A solid glowing stretch of it along the far palace walls, black smoke and an inferno that might have been burning hours rather than seconds.

He has a moment. One moment to wonder if it's real, and from then, the clearest thing—from that moment and until the night ends—is the counting.

The room erupts in a flurry of movement and noise. He thinks Jonny takes his hand when one of the guards tries to take Jonny's, but only knows that he does count Jonny's fingers gripped against his own, for no reason he can name.

He counts the number of times the Queen slips into French, the number of times she says and screams that she "told him" once he realizes it's something she's repeating.

He counts the black marble tiles in the hallway as they pass them: forty-three before they're stopped, before they lose one guard to hold off two men with two revolvers. Sixty-five before they lose the second.

He counts Jonny's fingers again when Patrick is the one to tug him along, no earthly idea where to go except out. Out of here—out. Two flights of stairs behind one wall panel that he knows like he knows the horses, twelve windows, hundreds of breaths, one more wall panel, sixteen steps to the kitchens where the stone is six tiles wide at the back entrance. 

Zero bodies here, just their own, just the four—four of them led to the stables because he—he doesn't—where else? And near the stables there are too many people to count, finery and night clothes, a scream at a gunshot and Patrick doesn't think—leaps up to take the reins of a horse he doesn't know, readied for someone else—maybe Jonny's great uncle's—he doesn't know—but he yells once for them to get in, waits thirteen seconds for Maggie to shove—to push the Queen, lift Jonny into the coach.

There is one shout from his own father, he thinks—thinks he knows the voice, knows, "Patrick, the train station!" firm and angry, cutting through his thoughts of where to go, where he should—

So he goes. He doesn't know if they're sitting, or if they're ready. He just goes. Faster than is safe, faster than he's ever gone. Four miles to the train station, five buildings past, two following after them, fifteen buildings—losing count—eight.

One train when they pull up. A whistle.

He jumps down from the carriage before they've come to a complete stop, feels the impact in his legs like it isn't quite his body, like it belongs to someone else.

The hands aren't his tugging Jonny down, or his feet crunching through the snow, his ears—even as the noise of the crowd they edge into drowns out everything else. Three of them now, he realizes, only three.

There aren't any gunshots here, but there's still screaming. A woman yelling, "George!" repeatedly, almost keeping a beat. A man stood frozen, mouth gaped open as he stares out towards the palace in the distance like it's something from his imagination, knocked out of it only when Patrick shoves past.

He has to shove past two children, a girl in a nightgown, an old woman with a bleeding nose. He counts Jonny's fingers, can't even feel them separately, but still does it, unsure when he took them again, but there's five—one two three four five, one two three four five, one two three—steady in his head while he pushes forward where the crowd is thickest, a solid mass pressed against the brakeman shouting,

"We're full—we're at capacity! You—"

The train is already moving—a snail's pace, but taking off with a screech of metal, and Patrick says, "Wait," with an elbow shoved in his face, a stray knee to his stomach. "Wait." Someone moves him bodily out of the way. "The queen—the prince—wait!" 

There is no waiting, only the mass of people as the screaming lifts into something new around them—something panicked.

"Patrick!" Jonny shouts, jostled as any of the rest of them, the Queen nearly pushed off her feet as she attempts to pull Jonny herself, face so white she looks sick.

Then a shout of, "Andrée!" that pierces through. Another—"Andrée!" booming from the train, from the back of it as it inches along, a man hanging out from the edge—a relative? Patrick doesn't—

But there are one two three four five fingers in his, a strange calm while he moves towards that shout, faster while the engine speeds—a thinning of the crowd in the confusion, an opening, and a quick step onto the back of the train from the platform.

He loses Jonny then, but turns, reaches out steady as he pulls away with the train, knocks an arm out of his face that isn't one he wants and takes the Queen's outstretched hand. She's clumsy climbing on, has to let go of Jonny too, pale and silent—nearly loses her footing to a woman trying to get aboard as well, but doesn't.

It's easy for Jonny to move with the crowd, all of them trying for the same direction—his first attempt to step on thwarted, but making a second, extending his leg and—

Then it happens like a surprise—the end of the platform.

Patrick blinks at it in a kind of wonder, startled by the impossibility—by the fact that he is on the train and Jonny is standing at the edge of the raised wood, shocked, being shoved again, moved as men jump from the platform around him.

The queen screams from next to Patrick, screams no and Jonny's name and something desperate in French while the man who'd shouted at her holds her around the middle, and Patrick leans forward—the train still moving slowly—he yells, "Jump!" as loud as he can. "Jonny, jump!"

Jonny jumps. It's a drop, but not too far. He catches himself on the gravel, on his hands and the balls of his feet, takes off at a run, faster than the woman in front of him.

Patrick keeps yelling, gets down onto his belly, yells, "Run!" and Jonny does just that, catching up quick but keeping pace less easily, ducking away from someone who tries leaping ahead of him.

Patrick sticks his arm out so far it hurts, the metal pressed hard into his shoulder, jammed up against his face, his breath caught, and then there it is.

One two three four five fingers grasped around his own, tight and crushing, and he pulls as hard as he can as Jonny jumps, falters but keeps his legs moving, keeps running—jumps again and finds some foothold, makes it up, scrambling nearly over the railing as they gain even more speed, his mother's hands tight on his jacket, pulling.

But he does fall.

He slips out of Patrick's grip, back over the railing in an instant, like he'd been swatted away by some invisible giant. There's a moment of disbelief, of confusion as Patrick stares after him, arm still outstretched, cold in the wind.

He can hear Jonny's mother screaming next to him, but his ears feel detached again, belonging to someone else while he watches the red smear of Jonny's head grow smaller, vanish with the distance.

*****************

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you, AGAIN, to allthebros for the end graphic. <3333333333
> 
> I'm on tumblr and twitter under the same username, come find me!


End file.
